The Lesson: A Process Towards Freedom From Psychic Illness, Sermon I

They gave the earth the respect it deserved in their efforts, The Bodhisattva made sure of that.  Clearing away forest is not a task to be taken lightly because the world can only give so much.  At his behest what was able to be transplanted by the workforce was, migrated to a green space at the other end of the property.  Stumps pulled from the earth and turned into things that are necessary–bowls, utensils, tool handles, furniture, mulch.  In so much as an ethos can be said to exist as it pertains to the bosom of nature around them, Rancho believes that waste is the biggest sin.  But the rock formation–The Monolith, the prehistoric tower of stone that seems to inspire something in The Bodhisattva–has been given the wide berth becoming of a destination point.  The field is open up to it, and the trees and their roots have been cleared behind it to stretch back fifty feet at least in a semicircle.  The rest of the trees do not come down.  They are now protected.  Old comrades of The Monolith, their wisdom more youthful to it but ancient to the humans who come here to meditate, to pray, to work something out.  Offerings of the land litter its base now, flowers and bundles of sweet herbs and carvings from sticks, polished river pebbles, muddy quartz dug from the ground itself.  Prayer flags, malas, notes written on paper and hung with string–prayers, wishes, poems.  In so much as the sight of this thing has seemingly inspired Sage to a greater place of his own understanding, it either has the same effect on the gathered, or they’re following suit.  To a certain point, it doesn’t matter which.  For they are together.  They are united in purpose.  

—

The Lesson, Sermon I.  That’s what the chyron reads on the black screen before cutting abruptly to Sage Pontiff himself–newly short, still sporting his beard, walking calmly in a plain kimono in front of The Monolith, speaking to gathered attendants at Rancho Mundo.  “I’ve always avoided giving what anyone could call a ‘sermon.’  Not because I have any real like…aversion to the idea of it, to the concept of it.  But I never wanted to be someone people listened to.”

He begins to pace to his left, the wide-legged patchwork fisherman’s pants that he’s become accustomed to wearing making soft swish swish sounds against the grass, his many beads and trinkets clattering against one another softly, all mingling with the chirps of the birds in the morning sunshine.

“The thing is…it keeps happening.  Years go and years go and the only constant seems to be two conditions for which there is seemingly no cure.  One is that people are drawn to my ideas.  The other is that I have this firm, unshakable belief in something.  Something that I’ve tried to stitch other philosophy to.  Because this isn’t an age for something to be made from whole cloth, not anymore.  Stakes are too high, the flames are already licking at our feet.”

With a turn, he begins to walk the other way, letting his hand linger on one of the rough sections of The Monolith, a part that has been shielded by a large jut of rock above it, not smoothed over by centuries of rain. “So when you believe something, and not in the fun ‘well I think’ way that we’re used to, right?  When you know it in your bones.  When it’s as much a part of your spirit as anything else in your life, your name and your experiences and how a sunrise makes you feel…it’s hard, right?  How do you find the words for the feeling?  How do you know the language of the belief when you can barely put a name to what it is?  So you seek.” A soft smile plays on his lips.

“You always seek.  And you think you’ll do this great thing that surely no one else has thought of, where you’ll take something from this and something from that.  I'm guilty of it.  We all are!  Because all of us have felt a need to put words to something.  And I thought I had it, y’know?  I thought I held it in my hand and turned my back on it because I was above it.  I sought to control something that I now understand to not be a thing to control, because the notion of ownership can be poison.  I do not hold it in my hand.  I do not possess it.  I am not the arbiter of its law.  I have no greater claim to The Lesson than any one of you sitting here.  I’m talking to you and giving you what I know because I have been taught.  Over and over.  I am a collection of lessons that have left their signature in my skin.” He holds his arms out, as if to regard it all–the sky, the trees, the ground, The Monolith.

“It is something ancient.”

—

The first infrastructure for living was the laying out of pallet flooring for any and all who wanted it.  This has organized the tents into the rough structure of neighborhoods connected by what amount to roads, wide spots where people walk and lumber is moved.  They spread from the nucleus of the Rancho like beams of sunlight in a child’s drawing.  By his specifications, the cabin that was on the property when he purchased it has not been expanded.  It has been repaired–foundations given a lift, walls patched, roof in reasonable shape, chimney rebuilt.  But it remains for him and him alone.  Though the offer is there amongst this sea of his followers, he has not taken a lover.  The rare person who asks him about this will get a soft smile and a nod, as if he’s in on a joke that you’ve not heard.  He’ll tell them about how that trip appealed to him as a younger man, but that now he’s content with different expressions of flesh.  He’d tell them that what he did in his younger days was he took.  And now he wants to give.  This is what that looks like, for him.  So when the evening draws to a close for him, some nights earlier than others, the door closes with him and him alone.  The room is sparse, a few personal effects and a mattress on a wooden platform near the fireplace.  On the mantle, there are a few small statues and keepsakes. There’s also a picture frame on its face.  No one asks him about that. 

—

“We are tapping into something of a primordial basis, y’know?  Some have said that we were, as a people, as humanity itself, sick from our inception.  That there was rot in us.  That all we knew how to do was take and consume and ruin.  But I don’t really dig on that kind of trip.  I’ll tell you why.” He’s now seated at the foot of The Monolith, lotus posed on a mat, a seemingly fairly large flower print shoot drawn around his shoulders.  With his shaved head and blonde beard he resembles less the music festival burnout of his early days, now closer to Ragnar Lothbrok.

“We were simple.  Our needs were simple.  And like every other animal, we met them and moved on.  The idea of stockpiling, of resources, commerce, money, employment, pavement, taxes, credit scores, and all of the sorcery of the modern age that sucks us fucking dry…that all came later.  And apply whatever you’d like to it, The Devil or Shaitan or just that we were never ready for the advance of technology that we were the stewards of, but it got us.  It ruined us.”

Sage holds his arms out.

“All of this is an effort to peel that away.  To carve that cancer from us.  To dive beneath the dross of existence and to find something that is real.  Something that’s true.  Hold out you hand, palm up, all of you.  Look at it.  Take the thumb of your other hand and dig it into your palm.  Harder.  Feel that.  Don’t just experience it, either, I want you to feel.  Become in tune with what you’re experiencing, note your physical reactions to this, compare those to how you feel when you hear music or eat food.  It’s unrivaled, unparalleled.  Why?  The pain, the prickles of nerve sensation that travel down your fingers.  That’s something real.  That’s something that’s true.  All of our journeys though separate brought us here, at this moment.  Why is that?”  He smiles, looking across the gathered attendants.  There must be an easy two hundred people around him, maybe even three.

“I believe that this is where we are all meant to be.  At this moment.  With all the chaos that exists outside of what has become my home, what I hope has become yours as well, we had to arrive somewhere and build something almost to spite all of that, almost to prove that we can, to piss in the eye of the apocalypse.”

Head thrown back.  There is not a cross word said, not a sneer or a jeer or even a cough.  No one fidgets.  Rapt attention.

“And to break through ages of distraction down to the blood and flesh and bone of what is important.  Of The Lesson itself.”

—

The last time they engaged in The Lesson, Sage lost a tooth.  It is not often he gives of his flesh–he sees it as important to not be seen as the vessel that The Lesson comes through, but merely a shepherd of it.  Showing others how to reach the transcendent place where their pain and hurt and confusion all bleed into one burning sensation, where sins are forgiven and forgotten and justified all at once.  Where the accumulated trauma of our existence courses through an activity atavistic and brand new both at the same time.   It’s a rare place.  In quieter moments with more trusted followers, he’ll admit that he doesn't get there every time.  That he is fallible, that his greed can drive him to try and engage in it when the energy isn't correct and his mind and spirit aren’t in alignment, that the desire to heal and learn cannot outpace one’s readiness to accept the teachings of the act.   This serves two functions:  It’s a cautionary tale, and it shows him to be human.  The former is important, the latter is more his own fear.  He remembers what being regarded like this can be like.  He knows the worry that grips him at night when he is alone and he meditates on the flames, thinks about his mistakes and shortcomings, replays his failures, wonders what his life would be like if he were back at the dome in Joshua Tree, or if he had quit the business when he had the chance to walk away.  None of this would exist.  Would that be worth it? He asks himself that every night before bed.  Sometimes he asks it to the picture that always ends up back on its face.  Every time he goes to bed not knowing, and wakes up with the certainty of a Franciscan.

—

“Do not consider me selfless.  See?” Sage lays somewhat sprawled on the ground, held by a person who is not as tall nor as cut as he, but who bears the signs of being in a fight that they have won.  Knuckles bloodied.    A few red marks about the head and neck and face, a defensive scratch on the forearm drawing up bright crimson through his sun baked tattoos.  Whoever this individual is, Sage isn’t introducing.  He merely cradles the Bodhisattva in the shadow of The Monolith, Pieta writ in the bodies of these revolutionaries of the spirit.

And Sage himself?

Lip split.  Nose crooked.  Black eye developing, blood vessels burst in the eye itself, giving his heterochromatic eyes even more of a stark contrast.  His bear carries a dark crimson streak down the middle, as if blood has been cascading from his nostrils and mouth down the length of it.

But he doesn’t seem in pain.  He seems light.

“The flesh is the key.  The fight is the key.  I don’t not hear you wondering.  ‘Why does he leave here to fight for money, isn’t that the antithesis of what we’re attempting?’  I have those…questions, doubts, too.  ‘Why’.”  He coughs, wincing, his arms instinctively going to his bruised midsection.

“I think there’s the obvious answer and the not so obvious.  The obvious answer is more fights equals more money, and more money means more of the land connected to what is already ours, which means an ever-increasing buffer between us and a world that would see us crushed.  The not so obvious is…I hope.  Against all logic, I hope.” A soft smile, made cockeyed by the lumpiness of his lips, spreads across his cheeks.

“I hope.  Hope is a deceitful thing, but I figure if I can reach one person, maybe they understand the power of The Lesson.  I don’t know that Max Kael will understand, and he doesn’t seem the receptive sort, but I hope.  I hope that he takes of my flesh and finds forgiveness in my blood.  I hope that he tears me to pieces and becomes somehow sanctified by the process, feeling the sins of his life fade into nothing.  I want the things that plague him to become vapor, y’know?  I want them to cease operations on his aura so we can watch the black veins of the sickness of the modern world retreat from his soul.” Another cough.  The fry in his voice is becoming worse–one can infer that the person cradling him probably got him around the throat at least once.

“There is a world that exists where what I do, what myself and Max and Hayes and Ria and Nate and any of us do is no longer necessary.  We are a zoo for the spiritually infirm.  Those who have been conditioned by this world to fear the teachings of pain can rubberneck violence and catch a glimmer, a ghost, right?  A small taste of what we all knew in the times before language.  They have forgotten it, and the fight I’ll have may not let them remember it.  It may not teach Max the true value of what we do, the true power of our existence.  But maybe it makes someone curious.  Maybe it leads someone here.  Or elsewhere.  On their own path. Because what’s important isn't who does the awakening, it’s that the awakening occurs–it is significant enough on its own that ownership only cheapens its impact.  I am not the cure.  Understand that?  I am not the cure.”  Pontiff raises one arm slowly, indicating the gathered circle with a trembling limb.

“The Lesson is the cure.  I am nothing.  It is not a selfless act.  This is not another person eating your cancer, it is both of us arriving to a plane of existence where it cannot reach us.” With a wince and an intake of breath, he begins to scramble to his feet.  The person holding him attempts to help, but The Bodhisattva waves him off, getting to standing on his own.  He’s on rubber knees for a moment, but slowly his spine stiffens and his stance becomes powerful.

“See?  I am injured.  I am healed.  All at once.  Both at the same time.  The more this hurts, the more sickness is driven from our psychosphere.  This is the core tenet and the most distilled truth of The Lesson.”

He walks towards the camera, smiling a bloody grin, his eyes so clear that it feels like he can see forever.

“In time, you will learn.  Everyone will.  Because learning, much like bleeding, is something everyone can do.”  The video concludes with this.  The screen goes black.

The chyron reads: Sermon I Concluded.  Sermon II Upcoming.